Today's enterprise data centers store ever-larger amounts of business critical data that must be immediately and continuously available, and highly reliable. Information technologists, storage managers, and administrators of storage systems take many precautions to protect against the effects of failures in order to avoid downtime. Occasionally, however, a particular storage system, such as a storage array, requires upgrading or replacement.
To replace a current storage array with a new storage array, all data and connections on the current storage array must be migrated to the new array. The storage system then requires re-initialization. In addition, the host systems previously communicating with the replaced storage array require reconfiguration. This re-initialization and reconfiguration requires some downtime to complete; consequently, host applications lose access during this period to the storage array, and potentially to some critical information. For many business systems running critical applications, this interruption is unacceptable.
There is a need, therefore, for systems and methods of upgrading or replacing storage arrays transparently with respect to host systems communicating with the storage arrays, management applications managing these arrays, and host applications providing particular storage functionality at these arrays.